Born and raised in Peterborough, Ontario, Shannon attended Bowdoin College in southern Maine on a hockey scholarship where he served as Captain his final year. Upon graduation, he took his hockey career to Germany and began focusing on learning the business side of the game serving as General Manager for multiple professional teams. After turning around three separate franchises and becoming one of the leading GMs in Europe, Shannon shifted his entrepreneurial spirit towards music. In 2011, he founded the Boots and Hearts Music Festival, which in 2015 became the largest country camping music festival in Canada, and second largest globally behind Stagecoach.
In 2015, McNevan launched the WayHome Music and Arts Festival in partnership with AC Entertainment. With Neil Young, Sam Smith, and Kendrick Lamar headlining, plus 60+ other acts from varying genres, WayHome became the biggest first-year, camping, music festival launch in North America in the previous decade with 32,000 daily attendees.
In 2016, McNevan was named Director of Country A&R for Universal Music Canada (UMC) at a time when they had yet to sign a single country artist to the roster. That same year, he launched the management company Starseed Entertainment alongside Adam Skuse and Don Green. Starseed’s roster now includes James Barker Band, The Reklaws, Dean Brody, Jade Eagleson, Emily Reid, Chad Brownlee and Griffen Palmer.
Led by McNevan, Starseed Entertainment's roster has put some unprecedented numbers on the board in only 3 years. 400+ live shows, 20 Top-10 singles to Canadian Country Radio (including six #1s), 16 gold singles, 2 gold albums, 4 platinum singles. and over half a BILLION global streams. Starseed now finds themselves in unique position as the top Country Management company in Canada by virtually every performance-metric.